Disclaimer: this is your daily “crafting bad” thread.
There are voices, here and there, that Fatshark did not learn anything from Vermintide, in terms of crafting at least. I want to disagree with those. Fatshark did their lesson, but to our detriment really.
Starting point: why so big? :: Warhammer: Vermintide 2 Helmgart Keep - General Discussions
It is explicitly said, that they designed game (so crafting as well) for max 100 hours of meaningfull gameplay and progression. In that time, you will never get hold on all orange weapons, neverminding all required breakpoints. They wanted that you never get perfect weapons, starting lack of red ones only support that. Player supposed to play only with random (shitty) gear, maybe get one or two god-rolls.
Now there comes Darktide. FS known that people will play by the thousands of hours, not mere hundret. They really wanted to stick to the idea of playing with mostly random weapons, so they just increased grind time tenfold. Problem solved, now players will allways have to relay on randomness, as they always wanted.
But there is a difference between vermin and dark. While in V2, blessings (perks) are just small addons to the weapons, that are nice to haves, blessings in DT could transform how the weapon should be used. Some are useless without good blessings even.
Probably they didn’t even had malicious intent, FS just wanted to provide more fun for players, unfortunately they never understood, what fun actually is. As the saying goes: “never attribute something to malice, when it can be explained with incompetence”.
In my opinion the crafting system is just there cause some people in VT2 started to complain that after a while you didn’t really have any use for the chests.
So they tried to have the weapons where they have modifiers, have more blessings and traits to lenghten the time where those complaints would come, did it work, yes, but to much, now people complain that it’s not fast enough, and not stable enough
It’s not so much the rate of development or gain of weapons in isolation, it’s the lack of player agency that’s the real issue.
Yes OP makes a good point about chests and dust being largely redundant after a while in VT2 (I reckon I’ve got 1200 Emperors Chests unopened), but that’s because there’s a little more control over what you can get. Once you’ve got a red weapon and have the dust you can simply click and roll the stats you want - hence making dust and chests redundant.
Fast forward to DT and in an attempt to stop players having huge amounts of unopened/unclaimed loot and heaps of mats they’ll never use - FS have utterly destroyed the small amount of Agency players had when rerolling properties and traits in VT2.
So we end up with where we are, no agency and multiple horrible layers of RNG.
You can concede there is some logic in the way things were designed on paper. Blessings probably should have a much greater impact on the way weapons work, Various weapon MK’s whould make differing weapons out of similar models, and a vast array of multi-layered stats could potentially bring all kinds of nuanced gameplay choices.
BUT
There’s no meaningful way of building towards anything you want to try out and as such all the stats/weapon MK’s/blessings/ traits/whatever don’t matter if it’s completely random how they all come together. I have a sneaking suspicion that FS have this monstrous spreadsheet on Excel that shows how everything imacts each other thing and it’s so mind boggling it’s virtually impossible to figure out, let alone balance. #BreakingTheLocks might utterly f%ck everything, and no one even knows what’ll happen.
I’m not even talking about god-rolls here, just players trying out new stuff at higher difficulties is agonising to even get there. > This then forces players to go away and research EXACTLY what they want before they brick their weapon and it builds a much bigger frustration trigger that players simply can’t get near to their perfect roll they want as there’s no point even trying other builds.
So firstly, well done OP for actually promoting some kind of talk about why we are where we are but it still doesn’t change the fact the game is circling the drain. If I smoke enough Copium and Hopium I think maybe FS are working like Billy-o to rework craftin entirely without demolishing their players who have worked towards their weapons.
I doubt whoever designed this system never has ever considered games with a satisfying loot and crafting system.
Because there are lots.
BUT.
Considering we didn’t even get crafting on release, they were probably too late in their milestones to come up with something good, and tasked whoever to come up with something
If you are correct and this is the route FS took with Darktide, then the people at the helm simply don’t play their own creation, and are utterly clueless what makes a good game and what keeps people invested. I dont mind grinding towards better weapons. That literally is the purpose of a game like this. But this isn’t grinding. This is a lottery. An infuriating lottery with key spam. And even the best rewards in this lottery are severaly dissapointing. The fact that you can store only one blessing for a weapon for example is incredibly idiotic. It just makes me store an enourmous cache of weapons with sacrificial blessings for the time that maybe i will get the stats I want.
The fact that a modder has developed by himself(or with friends, have no clue tbh) a customization tool for the weapons in the game that surpasses anything FS has delivered speaks volumes.
The entire system is bad. Nearly all of it. You can point at almost any element of the game and say rubbish, unfinished, wasted idea, annoying or infuriating feature.
People bring up the “amazing update” - The Orthus Offensive. What did that update bring? You have 3 pieces of insignia after it. That is all. Why can’t I get the plasma gun used by them? Or the helmet? Or literally anyting else. If these are the updates the game is set for it is doomed. The only things that are good is the ambiance, art work and some gameplay if it is not interrupted by bugs or sound clues. The rest is of extremely poor quality.
One more point to make is this constant comparison to VT2. Like it would be a good thing if DT would copy more or be more of what that game is. VT2 is now at 3k people daily and it was released barely 6 years ago. It is a meh game not a success story. The game had an extremly mediocare run if not a failed one from a perspective of games like Warframe. DT should be nothing like it. It should be surpassing it by quantum leaps considering the amount of experience FS has with the IP and coop system.
I am so far past the point of guessing intensions or giving the benefit of doubt. This game has been plagued by incompetence and mismanagement from day 1. It’s just the regret that this IP is being utterly wasted due to idiotic management of the game, and frustration that people defend this dev behaviour and lack of quality. It is a count down to shutting down the servers as this game with 5k daily players max will not sustain itself. This is not 2018 when coop games were all the rage. The market is heavily oversaturated and the economy is on a downspiral. I am a die hard fan of WH40k, but even I will have a breaking point, despite dumping money into this game and it’s cosmetics, and just move to something else.
I doubt that is the case, consider the weapon customization mod… That person simply enabled client side access to customization that was already in game.
They wanted customization from the ground up, but it got shelved and the gacha system that is in place got put in in a panic…
It’s a mod, not a creation of assets. He enabled access to customization that was already in place. The customization ability was already in game, fat shark simply opted to go the path of weapon marks instead of base models you modify.
Yes, somehow the wrong conclusions were drawn in every aspect…
No one who played Vermintide 2 for any length of time did so because of the crafting, but DESPITE the crafting.
All these item levels are just there to build up an artificially prolonged tutorial until after 200h you start spending thousands in the endgame, when item acquisition plays little to no role anymore. All this BS could have been avoided simply by completely abandoning crafting. No item levels, no weapon stats, nobody needs perks either - just meaningful Blessings that you are guaranteed to unlock over time by using the weapon. The cherry on top of the cake would of course be an attachment system to customize it to your personal preferences in terms of handling. Everything else could just as easily have been packed into the skill trees.
In my opinion, FatShark only needs to learn one thing and that is that they should focus on their strengths, i.e. gameplay, atmosphere, varied levels!
And NOT in countless complicated subsystems that do absolutely NOTHING to make people actually use an entertainment product for that purpose.
We have 3 ways to get skins in Darktide (Penances, 2 shops) and 3 places for weapons and weapon modifications… what’s the point? Simplify it, make it easy to understand and accessible.
Why on God’s green earth does it matter what it is? The fact that FS doesn’t have the brainpower to "opt"as you put it, for the obvious choice of giving the player more tools to play with after all the feedback they received coupled with how ez it would be for them to do it makes it only a 100 times worse.
I, personally, don’t much care for what the crafting system is balanced around. What matters is if it’s fun to engage with, at the end of the day.
IMO Darktide’s crafting mechanics fail that fundamental requirement. They’re frustrating and unrewarding by design, and I hope I don’t need to explain why that’s a bad thing. And the frustrations are primarily RNG driven.
It’s not exactly just a switch that the modder has diggen up (Like the “For the Emperor” mod), what the mod does is enable the ability to pull parts out of the library, then they manually have to adjust the placement of the weapon parts, but iirc Graas also said that certain parts aren’t made to link to each others, even though they are made to be adjunct, but not with each others.
And what a shame it is. The Weapon Customization is freaking amazing.
Their vision is different. Insulting their intelligence sure is going to make them change their mind…
What’s more, the laser sight is completely unique. The modder took the redeye effect and that way programmed the laser from the ground up.
All the other parts were already in, though. It’s obvious the custom weapon skins Fatshark sells are made from these past (and then painted with some internal tools or such).
A long time back I saw a really good comment on Steam. To date, I still think that’s the most likely explanation:
When Darktide launched (note that it was no early access launch but a full one), it had literal “coming soon” tags on half of all crafting. In addition to tons of bugs, massive and obvious balance and QoL issues all over the place, it only had a handful of missions & mods, with many blessings and talents not even working. There was next to no story, and no sight at all of the many promised features like weapon customization, solo mode etc. So it’s pretty obvious they had to rush the game out when it was nowhere near finished.
So we had a game that was marketed as live service, now owned by a company that highly prioritizes player engagement, yet it had less content than a fresh early access title. What options do you really have to deal with something like that?
Suddenly the fact that we had no mission selector, timegated missions and stores and no Brunt’s (the “buy any gray weapon” store, it took forever until they added that), an atrociously brutal gearing with several tiers of RNG so no-one can realistically “max out & finish the game”, super slow resource grind, ridiculous penances (which were way worse after release) etc etc, begin to make a lot more sense: It’s the best, fastest and most affordable way to make the most of the little content the game had / has.
And I understand that. Stuff like that is rarely in the hands of the devs, they just have to make the best they can while the top floor keeps slapping them with one unrealistic deadline or demand after another. What I don’t get is why it takes them so incredibly long to push out patches and content? This isn’t an indie company we’re talking about after all. Unless they really did have to rush the game to such an extent that the code is such a mess it takes forever to make the tiniest changes. Which would certainly explain the odd bugs like soundless specials that’s been unresolved for 5 months soon.
But as long as we have so little content and there’s nothing else to work towards other than the gear, I don’t see this changing any time soon.
I think a part of that is certification. They have a budget for hotfixes, but anything big has to go through the Microsoft/Xbox cert process, so they throw anything that isn’t easy/vital into these big massive patches.
To their detriment too, IMO, since there are so many changes in those patches they can’t possibly have tested the edge cases (or even basic testing beyond passing cert) and what comes out is a massive pile of fixes, additions and changes that they then have to spend the next period cleaning up, fixing and rebalancing it all because it just had to come out all together in one big patch.
Not to mention the old bugs that were fixed that come back every other patch or hotfix, but that’s a separate structural issue.
Yep, especially when in some cases it’s literally a variable change like store QL range and such.
I get the potential variables with working in a studio with deadlines and such myself, but i seriously wonder about either agency or intent when there’s more than a few things that would take a minimum of effort to change and if nothing else, just push it out for a week and get feedback from the playerbase.
If anything I’m more baffled that these choices don’t have a clear reasoning behind them unlike say, the cosmetics with content dialed down and prices turned up.
Not saying that out of anger or anything, it’s my choice to pay for something or not in the case of the cosmetics, but glacial pace of game changes/improvements is confusing to say the least.
Especially as someone who really liked the patch13 changes and the twins missions.
“Their vision is different. Insulting their intelligence sure is going to make them change their mind…”
For their intelligence to be insulted they have to have some of it at least. There is no proof of that, that I have seen since they released DT.
Considering that since release, every avenue has been tried of “convincing” the devs or trying to pass feedback in any shape and form and their absolute lack of care for the players and the game, I have no interest anymore in trying to guess how to ask nicely or pat them on the back wishing them another successful year with DT. This is what is happening with this forum. People thinking that if they only behave in a certain way and just say the magical correct words at the magical correct time then the almighty dev team will look at them from the top of their mountain and listen to us peasants and grant us a chage that we all hope for. But only one. No more. Only one change as they are the devs and we are the peasants. There is no need to listen or speak to us.
I hope they all get the sack. I hope FS gets bought out or goes bankrupt. I hope that they are forced to sell the game to someone who has a vision for it. And if that is not possible then I hope that all of this is turned to ashes, serving as an example for other dev teams on what happens when you shut your door, stick your fingers in your ears and sign lalalalala whilst your customers are leaving in droves and the core audience swallows frustration after frustration. They do not deserve the money we have spent on them. They are preying on people who are die hard fans of WH. Nothing else.
How many times does it need to be said? They are here to service us. We pay them. Not the other way around. And they are absolutely awful at their jobs.
I hope I made it clear enough.
Nobody asks you to “ask nicely” or “pat them on the back”.
But by constantly insulting them and others you poison the well of discussion. And worse, you dilute your own message.
You may have good ideas, but I don’t think people will get to these if the initial surface level of your post is to write in an antagonizing way. This is true for all discussions and negotiations you face in your life. By making it personal, you ironically make sure that things don’t get to a deeper personal level. It makes the other side, whoever they are, block you off as “one of those guys”. Doesn’t matter when, doesn’t matter where.
What discussion? What is being discussed here? With whom is the discussion being had? We are degraded to bicker between ourselves on how to speak to the people that we pay! Have you seen the posts about the bugs in the game? Have you seen the amount of them? Have you seen how many people are left playing the game? The forum is filled with either people dreaming of new assets in the game, new ideas, new maps, new weapons, or with people complaining on one of 10000 issues they are facing. Both sides get nothing. Does 2014 mean anyting to you? Check… Look at what is going on there. But be careful not to offend the “other side” because they might do what exactly? Not listen even harder? Ban me from the forum? Make even stupider choices to lower the quality of the game further?
I am the customer. I have waited patiently since day one for the issues with the product to be adressed. I have spent money having faith in their own words and the promises that they are working on the game and things will improve. This makes them liars at this point. If this was any other industry and any other product you would get a full refund and a replacement from the producer.
And stop telling me that I am insulting others. Yours or others feelings on being insulted when I have not insulted you are your problem. Not mine. Friendly advice.
